Well this is weird… we were having a discussion about this the other day and I was led to believe that invites where intrinsically admin-only (/me raises a quizzical eyebrow at @blake) . I’m a non-admin on only a couple of Discourse sites, and I can’t easily find a way to invite someone on those. Where are you seeing invite functionality as a non-admin?

If you go into settings: /admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=invite you can set the 'default invitee trust level` and crank it up to 4. There is not a “staff only” setting that I’m aware of, but if you also check ‘must approve users’ this will ensure that if they aren’t invited by a staff they can’t join unless they are approved by staff.

That item sounds like it does something else, unless the label is just confusing. The label on the left says “default invitee trust level,” which would refer to the user receiving the invitation, and the label below the dropdown box says “Default trust level (0-4) for invited users,” which I’m guessing also means the same thing. So if I set that to level 4, wouldn’t that mean that newly invited users would get promoted to level 4 upon accepting the invite? If so, that’s definitely not what I want.

I’m using Discourse for a private membership forum for a club, so only the admin should be permitted to invite new members in (to ensure that invites are sent only to current club members). The forum is for club members only, so we wouldn’t want members inviting non-members to join.

Think of it like a Toastmasters club. Members pay dues to be in the club. It wouldn’t make sense to allow anyone to invite non-members to join the club’s forum if they haven’t joined the club first.

I am in the same situation, a members only. For one reason or another we can not get SSO to work on our main site, hence the need to restrict invites. I want to exclude everyone (incl, moderators) apart from the forum admins.
Is there a way to do this?